Mechanically reinforces the brutality of MMA within the context of RGG's thematic sensibilities. Flawed combat that utilizes its difficulty curve to make Tatsuya's struggle just that much more worth it. Brushstroke stylization paints a beautiful narrative that places a violence-prone teen through a thorough character arc a lot of people can relate to. Even with some rushed segments in the recent translation, the script's intrigue and emotion are still present. Like Judgment, it's a fundamental understanding of what makes this series tick that allows Black Panther to feel at home with the other Yakuza games.

There's no way I'm gonna lose.

I understand this might be an unpopular opinion, but I wasn't particularly impressed with this game. Some fans love to complain about newer games in the series while praising the older games like they're the second coming of Christ or something. So when I finally played this game I was honestly pretty disappointed.

Genealogy of the Holy War presents itself as a political drama, but I found its characters to be rather flat. While some initially intrigued me, that interest quickly waned, especially after a significant plot twist. Most characters failed to leave a lasting impression on me and I struggle to recall many of them as they simply weren't memorable.

I can appreciate the game's attempt to explore dark themes like the child hunts, but I felt the execution fell short, often resorting to shock value without deeper exploration or nuance. The presence of cartoonishly evil characters also didn't help in making these themes feel more impactful.

I wasn't fond of the numerous bad tropes used in this game, but it's an old school jrpg so it's whatever. However, even if the narrative and themes didn't resonate with me, I could forgive that if the gameplay was at least enjoyable. God, the maps were atrocious. I know they're like that for the purpose of its story and objectives but they're NOT fun.

Destrega is one of those games that rocks as hard as you allow it to. You’ll be turned off by the bizarrely paced and awkwardly delivered dialogue, dated and wonky character models, easily exploitable battle system—or, like me, you will find all of this to be instantly endearing. Hell yeah, I want all of my tense emotional moments to be punctuated by Vine booms. Give me more of that!

I am pretty bad at fighting games, so I like when rounds are over so quickly that I don’t have time to mourn my losses. Destrega is generous in that way, being a light and breezy projectile-focused arena fighter with small HP bars and, at least when emulated, pretty quick KO-to-rematch times. (It might be terrible on original hardware. I haven’t tried it yet.) For better or worse, it’s easy to cheat your way through most fights by being the first to button-spam, but I had fun experimenting with the magic cancel and sidestep and the other (barely) more advanced moves. Destrega’s simplicity meant I could quickly work my way up from “I’m barely winning, but I’m just spamming Est” to something resembling adaptable skill. But that simplicity also might explain why this game has virtually no competitive scene, and I don’t know if I can get my brother into this game as much as we both got into Darkstalkers. Oh well.

More interestingly (to me, at least): Destrega’s story mode is endearingly amateurish and stuffed with underdelivered ambition. The underpinnings of the lore seem more fit to a full-fledged RPG: a long civil war strung out by several opposing factions with competing worldviews; political sabotage and assassination plots; families torn apart by duty and deception; a kind of shocking number of character deaths—none of this is explored in any depth, of course, but for a 90's fighter, the story mode feels oddly integral, not incidental. The vocal performances range from fine to inadvertently hilarious, the backgrounds (except the purgatorial green hideout cavern, suspiciously overused in the second third of the game) are decent, and the music is above par. This culminates in a bizarrely great cutscene right before the final boss, the best example of how much potential is in the worldbuilding were this game a different genre, one more invested in its plot...

...Which isn't to say I don't love Destrega as-is, in all its ham-fisted, low-polygonal glory. Long live PS1 jank.

Oh this was great! Some great scares, a few tricky puzzles, a fantastic art style, and an enticing narrative that had me constantly trying to piece things together and then it adds new pieces that force me to rethink my theories.
I will say the game is a touch too easy, even as someone who hasn't played too many survival horror games, but regardless it was a fun experience the whole way through.
Also you can press Y (or X depending on your button layout) to backstep, I don't think the game ever tells you that despite telling you about most other mechanics. I legit didn't figure it out until I beat the game fghgfghj

A game flooded and rupturing with so much ambition, so many ideas (even with so many barely explored), and such a fascinating, evasive legacy that its incompleteness only creates infinite depth. Xenogears is the oddly-shaped kernel of a still-expanding universe, a beating, bleeding heart of a story that wears its many influences plainly and proudly while still feeling unsettlingly different from any of its peers. There’s so much more that could be here, that is here, that is instead in Perfect Works and Xenosaga and Xenoblade and in everything that’s taken inspiration from it since. I’m obsessed with Xenogears. I think I will be for a long time.

bought this for my bf bc im a very sweet girl ???

anyhow this is genuinely vv cool,, works like crazy well for how tiny it is but has the worst sound effects/music in any game ever? def smth to be said about how easy it is to translate the game of tetris + how hard it is to fuck up a version of tetris. game is so universal as it takes like less than five seconds to understand the mechanics of classic tetris and it’s not like hard to master at all but it almost puts u into a trance like state??? idk I go quiet asf playing any version of this shii,, peak disassociation game.

In Pseudoregalia’s interpretation of the Metroidvania, ability-locked progression is a suggestion and not a rule, because the movement tech turns you into a god and the world into a playground. Getting to new areas frequently feels like cheating. The individual bits of level design that permit virtually infinite different methods of achieving the same platforming goals are expertly crafted and endlessly fun to mess with.

Granted: it takes a while to cross that threshold into liberating, game-breaking euphoria because you are granted none of the movement mechanics off the bat nor given any explicit guidance as to how to acquire them. I wrestled with feeling lost and underpowered in Pseudoregalia’s directionless, open-ended world for hours before finally reaching a point where I felt like my progression was limited only by my skill and not my (shitty) sense of navigation, but oh my god was it worth it. It just took a while to get there.

And when I say I wrestled with this game I do mean that. I started over three or four times, just to solidify my memory of the first few areas and remember/make note of where the hell you’re meant to find the essential starter upgrades. At one point I started making a hand-drawn map, which was actually pretty fun until I realized what my real issue with this game was: not the lack of an in-game map or explicit direction as to where I’m meant to go, but the sense of disorientation that comes from moving from scene to scene. Though I love the music, visuals, complexity, and challenges to be found in each distinct and reasonably navigable area, I had no sense of a larger space in which all these individual sections cohered. I’m not sure you could stack each of these maps together into a singular overworld, and if you can, I definitely couldn't do it in my mind or on paper.

On the other hand: Pseudoregalia’s open-endedness and the lack of hints, direction, a narrative thread is what facilitates and encourages the reckless kind of exploration you can get away with once you’ve acquired the right skills and gotten good enough with the tech. It’s hard to overstate how fun it is to chain five different abilities to scale a cathedral or wall-jump across a bottomless pit. I got stuck only for a few minutes on any given obstacle; if I found myself completely stumped, I assumed I was lacking some upgrades that might make those obstacles more feasible, then came back later.

And there can still be a real joy in just soaking up the atmosphere and wandering about aimlessly: though I’ve only lighted touched on it, the game’s art direction and lo-fi aesthetics are gorgeous in their confident simplicity and the hazy, dreamlike feeling they create. I was often confused and directionless and puzzling over my notes, but that doesn't mean I wasn't having fun. That's part of the appeal! The hypnagogic feel of this game reinforces that. So if you're anything like me, just try to suppress any panic that arises over the eternal passage of time ticking forward in the real world while you're running in circles around the Empty Bailey and you'll be alright.

If you do have as terrible a sense of direction as I do, you might benefit from (lightly) using this fantastic map. I referred to it like a checklist (I’ve been here, I found this thing) and scanned it for hints (there’s an upgrade in this area, a hidden passage over there somewhere). Perhaps the best resource would be a friend who’s played it before, who can gently nudge you when you need it…

Pseudoregalia is so close to perfection at its highest points that it’s worth fuzzing through (or soaking in) the confusion it throws at you from the start. And seriously: Twilight Theatre in particular is one of the most elegantly designed and rewarding levels I’ve experienced in any video game. I might play it through again just to experience that area one more time. What a gem.

where to start? kingdom hearts has always kind of fascinated me as this absolutely insane idea to blend disney cinema with final fantasy characters and storytelling, an utterly bizarre clashing of styles that doesn't really work in the traditional sense, but in the kind of hot-topic mallgoth edgy snow white way that was very prevalent in the early 2000s. it's clearly chasing more of a teen demographic rather than a child demographic, with it's slightly more complex systems and labyrinthine narrative, but there's never really a point where it can transcend the strangeness of having goofy in the same frame as cloud, or donald saying stuff like "the keyblade" in that bizarre raspy voice.

but there's a charm to it all, especially in the segments that aren't just replaying a disney movie (although there is still a certain disney charm there too), where there's this earnest naivety, seeing the world through the eyes of a child and trying to break free from what you know into a wider expanse of questions and adventure, and trying to pick up the pieces of what is lost and turn it into something new. a game with so many twists and turns and yet it remains as simple as just being a story of trying to right by your friends, and forgiving those who've wronged you when they try their best to make it up to you. while not as impactful as something like final fantasy x (almost done that one too lmao) in it's coming of age narrative, there's still an ultimate sweetness here that i can't help but let carry me on to the ending, even through the variety of frustrations.

and by god are there frustrations. i'll start with some of the most obvious ones, the top of which being the horrible platforming which is relied upon far too heavily. while never really punishing the player too much for missing jumps (with the exception of hollow bastion my god), the platforming remains imprecise throughout the entire journey, and can just add to so much tedium in sections like deep jungle or monstro where the player constantly has to retry sections due to missing a single jump. there's also the ever presence of backtracking throughout the entire game, which in levels like monstro, deep jungle, or hollow bastion which also suffer from confusing layouts, can become hideously time consuming and grossly aggravating. there's also heavy difficulty spikes throughout the game, which i will say could just be me being terrible at the game, but especially in the ending section there were bosses that took me upwards of two full hours to beat. the gummi ship adds absolutely nothing to the game and just extends travel sections with mind-numbing shmup levels. the combat is fun, but lock-ons can be clunky at the best of times and i could never get the handle of healing animation times especially when facing multiple enemies that just shred your health leading to a simply overwhelming amount of times where it felt like the game simply killed me for no reason. there's a gem of something really interesting in the combat system, with it's mix of real time battling and turn-based style menus, but it never fully comes together leading to a system which turns more cumbersome than engaging when dealing with the more difficult enemies.

there's also the elephant in the room of what this project looks like in the modern day. as we've extended further into the multiverse industrial complex, i think it's really easy to look at this as a precursor to some of the most diabolical machinations of the current-day cultural machine. combining all of these marketable properties for brand synergy, hitting both the disney fan and final fantasy fan at once, throwing all of these things together to make a boatload of money. but because this is so early on in the obsession with multiverses, and because it does feel like it has a really distinct and idiosyncratic voice behind all of the madness, this never really feels like a spider-man: no way home (had to look up what that one was called) or the flash type of debacle where they're constantly pointing at things you recognize for a cheap dopamine rush. in the end, it really is that charm that pushes through it all and keeps me interested in where this all goes, no matter how utterly stupid it can all be.

this game could beat my dog to death and i would still love it. pretty much every complain thrown its way boils down to "too hard :(", which is an only an issue if you've never exploited jank or save stated in your life. bloodborne could NEVER attain such gothy heights. i won't pretend this y2k quake engine iii game is front to back flawless level design - i'm a contrarian, not a psycho - but every area is very cozy and immersive (despite what gpu nerds may lead you to believe about the nature of video game immersion). i would live here. couldn't be any worse than florida.

haters, grow the hell up!!